Director of photography Neil Oseman was nominated for six Best Cinematography awards for his work on the indie fantasy series Ren: The Girl with the Mark. Here he explains his approach to lighting the series, from simulating firelight, to placing a fake moon and enhancing character with hard and soft daylight.
Ren: The Girl with the Mark is an award-winning web series remarkable for the high production values it achieves on a micro-budget. A newly released video gives a behind-the-scenes view into filming one of the show’s biggest sequences.
Tungsten and/or HMI lamps are usually the workhorse units of a lighting package, providing the power that is needed to key-light all but the smallest of set-ups. But they’re not right for every situation. If you don’t need the punch of a point source, and you want something a little softer, fluorescents might be the answer. This is the third category of lighting units I’m covering in my Know Your Lights series; back up to the overview if you want to start from the beginning.
Tungsten and/or HMI lamps are usually the workhorse units of a lighting package, providing the power that is needed to key-light all but the smallest of set-ups. But they’re not right for every situation. If you don’t need the punch of a point source, and you want something a little softer, fluorescents might be the answer. This is the third category of lighting units I’m covering in my Know Your Lights series; back up to the overview if you want to start from the beginning.
Following on from last week’s look at tungsten units, today we focus on HMI lighting. HMIs are more complex technology than tungsten, meaning they are far more expensive, and more prone to problems, particularly if you get a deal from a hire company and they give you older units. But they are bright and relatively efficient and because of this, and their colour temperature of 5,600K, they are by far the most popular type of light used in today’s film and TV industry when battling or mixing with natural daylight.
HMIs (hydragyrum medium-arc iodide) operate by creating an arc between two electrodes. This arc excites a gas which produces the light. In order to ignite the arc, a ballast is required. This device also regulates the current, while a special header cable connects the ballast to the light.
Following on from my ‘Know Your Lights’ overview, today I’ll look in more detail at the first category of lamps and the various units available and when you might use them.
And that first category is incandescent lighting, commonly known as tungsten. It is the oldest, simplest and most robust lighting technology. Tungsten lamps are the cheapest to hire, the easiest to repair, and emit a smoother spectrum of light than any other artificial sources, making for the most natural skin tones. For my money, there’s no better way to artificially light a human face than by bouncing a tungsten source off polyboard.